I’m guessing she must have been seven or eight when she went a little bit crazy with a green highlighter on the pages of her Bible. She marked up page after page, line after line, in her first “big people” Bible. It happened a few weeks after she got it.

She must have done her artwork under the covers, after we tucked her in and turned out the light. She could read by the glow of her night-light, I suppose, and maybe with the little numbers on her digital clock. Those numbers cast a soft, red glow from her night stand.

And while we thought she was sleeping, she had flipped pages of Scripture, marking thousands of words in green.

I asked Lydia later why she did that, why she marked all those words in green. And she said it was because of what I’d told her.

“I watched how you marked up your Bible with a green highlighter, and when I asked you why, you said it’s because you liked to mark your favorite parts.”

I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking, over-spiritualizing, over-sentimentalizing things. I’ve been known to do that. I mean, she could have been just another little kid who got a little bit crazy with a highlighter, a kid who wanted to see what it would feel like to mark page after page.

Except that she said it wasn’t like that at all.

She said she did it because of this –

Because of the story.

“The story is my favorite part. How it all goes together,” she told me. “And when I started marking words, I didn’t know how to stop.”

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